Ok, that was a lot of summary, but necessary I think.  I tend to be a fan of Bryan Singer’s movies.  Especially his earlier, more independent stuff like The Usual Suspects, and Apt Pupil.  When he made the leap to mainstream blockbusters like X-Men and Superman Returns I was right there with him, and found his Superheroic endeavors to be quite enjoyable despite not being as “important” as his early work.  Jack The Giant Slayer continues this string of fun fantasy adventures and I wasn’t disappointed.  I keep seeing Nicholas Hoult turn up in various things and am always really impressed with his performance as compared to other things I’ve seen.  He’s emerging as a very versatile and intriguing actor, and I look forward to seeing what he’s capable of when he starts playing more adult roles.

The rest of the cast is populated by actors I’ve grown to love over the years.  Ewan McGregor’s (The Impossible) role as King Brahmwell’s most gallant knight is probably the most fun I’ve seen McGregor have since Big Fish.  Stanley Tucci’s (Easy A) turn as the film’s villain is right up his alley as he is able to bring his trademark cunning to an unconventionally vile character.

I really enjoy how the film defies being predictable.  Things move in a fairly conventional way, with the hero vanquishing his foes to rescue the princess, but when the conclusion seems to be settling in and everything has about wrapped up nicely, that’s when the audience is treated to brand new, heightened stakes, new conflicts, and a grander climax worthy of Arthurian legend.

The Jack character is really well put together here.  Rather than a collection of virtues contributing to a single familiar archetype, Jack is forced to embrace his weaknesses, and call on strengths that those around him fall short on.  His ingenuity and intelligence are what he brings to the table besides his infatuation with the princess and the bravery that gives him.  Also, it has to be said that Jack is quite lucky, which I actually enjoyed a lot in the film because it was hilarious how Jack’s role as “Giant Slayer” mostly comes out of a series of accidents that results in dead giants.  I guess it’s true what they say:  History is written by the victors.

Overall, just a very fun endeavor, and well worth your time if you’re at all a fan of the genre, or have kids.  A fresh spin on a story we Bryan Singer, history begin?

Special Features include deleted scenes, a gag reel, and a featurette hosted by Nicholas Hoult about becoming a giant slayer.  Available on Blu-ray and DVD from Warner Bros Home Video on June 18.

A Good Day to Die Hard attempts to follow that dynamic, but what works so well in all of the Die Hard movies until this point is that they always found a good balance between the action sequences and the other scenes.  This installment is cram packed with action sequences, to the point of it feeling like any other generic action movie while losing all of those great “McClane Moments” that made the rest of the franchise so much fun.  The McClane character isn’t completely lost, and the scenes where he’s just interacting with other people and bestowing his trademark condescension are the highlight of the film, but they’re few and far between in this sequel.

The story is simple enough.  McClane goes to Russia to find his son (Jai Courtney), and discovers he’s working for the CIA trying to keep a witness (Sebastian Koch) safe from Russian terrorists.  So, with the many attempts to assassinate this witness, there’s a lot of gun fights and explosions and action movie plot twists, and fewer character scenes.

It was nice to see Mary Elizabeth Winstead reprise her role as Lucy McClane, John’s daughter, in this film, even briefly.  It would have been great to see Adam Long return in those scenes as well, since Live Free or Die Hard ended with those two characters getting together, and now we’re left to think that that didn’t work out, and everyone’s favorite hacker is sitting in an apartment somewhere desperately trying to win vintage Transformers on eBay while digitally bringing down society one step at a time.

A Good Day is available now on Blu-ray (in an extended cut of the film) and DVD from Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, but I would suggest just going with the 25^th Anniversary collection of the previous Die Hard movies and have yourself a really good day.

The packaging for the film doesn’t say that this is a Syfy original movie, but it’s pretty easy to tell after watching it for a little while.  All of the classic signs are here:  a cast you almost recognize, endless exposition about the film’s premise being scientifically plausible, and a group of archetypal and otherwise uninteresting characters.  This is one of the better Syfy originals I’ve seen though, with some legitimately good and even witty moments in the script, and a time travel element that doesn’t implode on itself with a bunch of amateur time travel narrative paradox problems.  The performances are about as good as you can hope for from one of these films, with Ryan Robbins definitely being the highlight.  The rest of the cast includes Nicholas Lea, who plays the WWII Ship’s sole survivor; Emilie Ullerup, who plays Lea’s granddaughter; and Gina Holden, who is some sort of generic government agent with limitless resources and a heart of stone.

This has to be the biggest misuse of the “based on actual events” line to draw in an audience.  Maybe there was an experiment during WWII to make a Destroyer invisible, and maybe the experiment ended with the ship exploding, but I am convinced that the rest of this film (basically all of it) is a complete fabrication.  It’s one thing to find out that something like The Blind Side, or The Social Network were sensationalized and exaggerated, but to spin a movie that’s 98% fiction as “based on actual events” feels cheap and manipulative to me.

No special features.  Available now on Blu-ray and DVD from Anchor Bay Entertainment.

Basically, HBO’s The Newsroom is about a fictional cable news program called “News Night” hosted by the hugely popular and moderate Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels; The Squid and The Whale).  However, even though “News Night” is fictional, the stories Will McAvoy and his team report on are real – beginning with the BP oil spill in April 2010 and moving forward through recent history with the shooting of a congresswoman in Arizona, Anthony Weiner’s sex scandal, the midterm elections, and of course the assassination of Osama Bin Laden.

The opening scene of the pilot episode, in which McAvoy yells at a college student about how America is not the greatest country in the world [anymore] was making its rounds on the internet for months before the episode actually aired and got me really excited to see what the show had to offer.  In the show, the incident leads to most of McAvoy’s staff leaving for different jobs and the network is forced to hire Will’s ex-girlfriend Mackenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer; Match Point) as the show’s new executive producer.  The two have a very troubled history and it leads to a lot of tension throughout the series, but both characters are played perfectly and a definite comrodery develops between the two despite their personal history.

All I really needed to know about this show was that Aaron Sorkin was behind it.  I have seen everything he’s ever written (The West Wing, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, The Social Network, Charlie Wilson’s War, Sports Night, A Few Good Men, and more) and have loved practically everything.  That being said, The Newsroom is his best work yet.  I hear a lot of criticisms of the show as being too liberal, which I get because even though the McAvoy character is a Republican trying to do a balanced news cast, it is the far right that more often than not comes out looking like a bunch of idiot children in the series.  McAvoy spends a lot of time pointing out how dangerously ignorant key members of the Tea Party are and how they’re dragging the Republican Party further in the wrong direction.  I’m a liberal, so it doesn’t bother me, but I can see the critics’ point as far as this is concerned.  Overall, however, I think “News Night” is an ideal for other news programs to strive for.  Despite McAvoy’s argumentative commentaries on the Tea Party, he is working to provide a fair and analytical report of the world’s news; working to be influenced only by what the American people need to know to be informed about current events, rather than his show’s ratings.

Now, a big reason why I think Newsroom is Sorkin’s best work is that he’s finally starting to learn from the mistakes that sank his previous behind-the-scenes series Sports Night and Studio 60.  Sorkin does a lot of things really well as a writer.  He’s great at writing dialogue that feels fun and banter-like but still manages to develop the characters, he’s great at writing characters who love what they do, he’s great at writing about politics and issues that affect all of us in a way that’s interesting and compelling.  However, he does have a couple of really big blind spots as well.  First, he’s not very good at writing romantic relationships.  If you go back and look at The West Wing or Sports Night, you’ll notice that any romance was few and far between, and when characters did become romantically involved it tended to fade away quickly and without being properly addressed by the narrative.  Studio 60’s insistence on developing romantic relationships between its primary characters quickly became tedious and repetitive and was one of the big reasons (in my opinion) that the show failed despite having a lot going for it.

Newsroom does have quite a few romantic relationships going on.  We have the love triangle between Jim, Maggie, and Don (John Gallagher Jr., Allison Pill, and Thomas Sadoski respectively) in which Maggie and Don keep breaking up and getting back together and Jim is left never finding a good time to tell Maggie how he really feels about her.  And then we have the Mackenzie/Will relationship which is interesting because she feels awful for how things went between them and he’s trying to act tough and stay mad at her, but can’t help letting down his defenses at times to show off for her.  I don’t know how Sorkin managed to finally write some romance that felt real and interesting, but at least through this first season, it all holds up nicely.

The other big pitfall Sorkin tends to fall into is his tendency to write drama surrounding characters worrying about ratings.  Sports Night’s second season and the second half of Studio 60’s one and only season are all mainly centered on the ratings of those shows, with characters wandering hallways whining about low ratings and executives demanding they get the ratings up, etc.  This is incredibly boring to anyone who does not work in television and I think it’s probably the chief reason that audiences ultimately gave up on both series.  Newsroom deals with ratings a little differently.  No one who works for “News Night” cares about ratings.  Well, McAvoy does at the back of his mind because it was such a big part of his life before Mackenzie comes on board, but ultimately he just wants to do the best news program possible even if it means he loses huge chunks of his audience.  Instead, we have the network president Leona Lansing (Jane Fonda) and her son Reese (Chris Messina) who are only concerned with ratings, but fortunately are not a huge part of the overall show.  Sorkin has managed once again to find a good balance and as long as the scales don’t tip against him, I can see this show going on for a long time.

To wrap up, I want to say that the entire ensemble of actors here is fantastic.  There are people in this who I’ve seen in other stuff and always liked, but had no idea they were capable of this caliber of performance.  That being said, I want to highlight Sam Waterston’s performance as Charlie above all the other already great performances here.  I’m not sure what Charlie’s title is, but he seems to be the executive in charge of “News Night” and the liaison between McAvoy’s team and the corporate executives.  I guess I would most closely compare Charlie to the Isaac character on Sports Night.  Everyone looks up to him as a father figure, so he’s really kind and beneficent, but more than capable to go to battle for his team and his show when the suits come knocking.  It’s a really terrific performance.

The Newsroom returns in July for its second season on HBO.  Special features include several behind the scenes featurettes with interviews with the cast and crew, episode commentaries, and deleted scenes.  Available Blu-ray and DVD from HBO Home Entertainment on June 11.

I kept waiting for the movie to feel like it was spread too thin.  With the premise, it feels like it should be, but amazingly the three storylines remain somewhat balanced and everything works well to push the Paul character forward.  Some people may be asking how a doctor was able to get into a gubernatorial race so late in the game, while the state senator and other governor had already presumably won primaries and were presumably in the final stretches of their respective campaigns, but it didn’t occur to me until after the movie was done that this doesn’t make sense.  The movie itself is well-crafted and the story is well-told, with realistic and interesting characters who have idiosyncrasies without feeling overwritten.  For example, Kerstin is a lesbian, and this fact has nothing to do with her role in each campaign – it’s simply a choice for the character, and I didn’t feel the need to question its significance just like I don’t feel the need to question the significance of the other characters being straight.

Rob Lowe is excellent here, and as much as I enjoy him on Parks and Recreation, it’s nice to see him return more to his signature style.  The film feels slightly reminiscent of The West Wing with the drama and humor blending together nicely, and it’s a real treat to see Lowe and Richard Schiff back on screen together even though neither actors’ characters feel similar to the ones played on The West Wing.  Paul is much more calculating than the idealistic Sam Seaborn, while Richard Schiff’s character, Dimitrius, is fun and flirtatious, and very different from any character Schiff has ever played before.

Another performance I’d like to single out for a moment is Jennifer Morison’s.  She has a small part here, but the nuance she brings to every second of it is really great.  I’ve become a big fan of her work on shows like House, M.D. and How I Met Your Mother, and understand her latest venture Once Upon a Time is very good as well, but her performance here is maybe my favorite yet.  The character is stupid and wide-eyed, but Morrison plays it in a realistic and hilarious way; especially her undying admiration for the big shot reporter in the film, Peaches O’Dell (Julie Bowen).

Overall, a very good movie with a little something for everybody.  It’s funny and dramatic, with characters to hate and root for, and comes in at a clean 95 minutes.

No special features.  Available now on DVD from IFC Films.

The documentary follows the Loving family through this whole process, pieced together from archival footage and newsreels from the time mostly, but with some interviews with the Lovings’ three children today.  It’s not the best documentary I’ve ever seen for a few reasons.  First, there’s not enough footage of the Lovings to establish them as individual characters and get us invested in their story.  Second, watching a documentary about the horrors of racism 50-60 years ago without any context for racial tensions still alive today feels a bit pointless.  I doubt anyone who watches this film and disagrees with its message that interracial marriage should be completely legal would be swayed by the Lovings’ story.  Finally, the documentary itself is rather crudely assembled.  There’s a lot of voice over of the various people involved talking; a lot of archival interviews with the Lovings’ lawyer Bernard Cohen, but not enough of them to fill a feature-length film.  So, the filmmakers fill time with ominous shots of dark streets in slow motion, old metal gates, and buildings.  It starts to feel like an old episode of Unsolved Mysteries, except there’s no mystery – we know interracial marriage is legal; we live in the future.

It would have been great if this film had been used to shed some light on present day racist atrocities, or even drew parallels between the civil rights movement and the current rally to legalize gay marriage, but instead the film simply tells the story of the Lovings’ struggles.  Perhaps making this more of a commentary or argument about the modern world would have its own problems.  I tend to have a hard time watching argumentative documentaries because it’s difficult to trust that the filmmaker isn’t editing the movie in such a way to manipulate his or her audience.  This is why I tend to enjoy documentaries like The Loving Story, which strive to be completely informative about their subject, but something about this one just struck me as pointless.  The one moment when the film does give us some modern context is in the end credits, when its revealed that Alabama resisted the Supreme Court’s ruling and kept anti-miscegenation laws in effect all the way until the year 2000.  This was the only truly surprising and interesting moment in the film to me, and wasn’t at all argumentative, so maybe the trick was to just provide context and parallels while keeping the film overall educational.

No special features.  Available now on DVD from Docurama Films.

Let’s start with the things I legitimately enjoyed about this film.  The cast assembled here is fantastic.  I’m a huge fan of Christina Hendricks (Mad Men) and Allison Janney (The West Wing).  I’m more and more enjoying Rebel Wilson (Pitch Perfect) as a comedic actress, and I was also pleased to see great comedic actors like Ken Marino (Children’s Hospital) pop up here in small roles.  I also really loved the ending, after the film loops back around to Carson’s death and how the other characters are changed or not changed by that.  It provides a lot of great moments for Janney, Wilson, and Sarah Hyland (who plays the captain of the cheerleading squad).  Not sure if these great character moments justify the ending or the film’s structure, but that brings us to things I almost liked about the film.

The problem with almost liking something is that you still don’t like it.  I think that setting up Carson’s death in the opening was the best possible option for having the character’s story end that way, but I’m not convinced it was the best way to go for this story.  I get that death is random and life can be unfair, but I would have liked to see Carson’s death mean something.  Plus, the little winks to the audience throughout the film to remind us that the lightning strike is coming is really annoying.  I also almost like Carson character.  Colfer emerges as a surprisingly good actor here, and it’s nice to know he’s capable of playing something beyond his super-androgynous character on Glee.  My huge problem with Carson is that he can’t help but demonstrate with everything that comes out of his mouth how much better he is than everybody else in this little town.  This might be fine if it weren’t for the fact that Carson is continually needing things from his classmates – specifically, to contribute to his literary magazine so he can go to Northwestern, but when he announces the magazine to the student body, he can’t seem to help himself but to imply they’re all witless, uncultured Neanderthals.  He is then of course surprised when the students stuff his submission box with garbage.  He’s not at all a likeable or sympathetic character, and sure he has the artificial wit of someone who’s every line has been polished over time, but ultimately he proves himself to be the worst character in an ocean of clichés and stereotypes.

When seeing that Colfer wrote the screenplay for Struck by Lightning, I became curious to see how old he actually is.  He’s 23, and I have to say that that doesn’t surprise me at all.  It’s an odd age for a writer; between forgetting what it’s like to be a teenager and not yet having any idea what it is to be an adult.  So, we’re left with a movie where Colfer’s character is written to be this hyper-intelligent, witty, capable, social outcast, while every other student falls into a neat little archetype box:  The cheerleader, the jock, the weird fat girl, the goth, the pothead, the theatre student, the celibacy tyrant.  You’ve seen these characters a thousand times, and very little would surprise you about their portrayal here.  Although, to give credit where credit is due, one of my favorite scenes in the movie is where Carson and Claire (Sarah Hyland) have a conversation about how she wanted to be a ballerina when she was in 2^nd grade and how that dream slipped away from her at some point.  It’s frustrating to know Colfer was capable of writing like that, but didn’t take the time to make the entire film character-driven and interesting.

In addition to the student-sized clichés walking around, we have the possibly bigger problem of the adult characters in the film.  Carson’s mother (Janney) has a variety of chemical dependencies and keeps talking about how she never wanted a baby.  His dad (DermotMulroney) left when he was 12 with no explanation.  His guidance counselor (Angela Kinsey) knows nothing about her job, and his principal (Brad William Henke) is constantly on a power trip to make his students’ lives miserable.  The theme to these characters seems to be that they’re all pathetic, petty little children, which again only serves to make Carson seem like the most “adult” character in the movie.  The only believable adult character is April (Christina Hendricks), who is engaged to Carson’s dad.  She actually manages to feel like a real character with real inner-conflict that is believable to the film.

Overall, the film just misfires in too many ways.  It’s quirky for quirky’s sake with non-realistic moments thrown in just to get a laugh.  For example, the sign at Carson’s funeral reads “Lightning Boy’s Funeral.  Bingo 4pm.”

Special features include a behind the scenes featurette, interviews with Chris Colfer and Director Brian Dannelly, Bloopers, and Deleted Scenes.  Available now on Blu-ray and DVD from Tribeca Film.

I’ve never seen Adam Sinclair in anything else, but he has a great charisma that makes it quite enjoyable to watch him carry an entire film.  His chemistry with Kristen Kreuk is spot on as the two find a perfect balance between intimacy and sexuality.  The other characters cycle through and we can go long periods of time without seeing them, but none of the characters feel incomplete.  Everyone gets exactly the amount of screen time they need to push this story forward and make this film work.

My one big criticism of the film is that even at 100 minutes, it could be tightened up a bit.  Not to say the film ever feels too slow or boring, but even though the repetitive nature of these characters’ lives works nicely as a metaphor for each of them being stuck in a loop, I wouldn’t have minded having some of the more repetitive beats replaced by anything that could push the story in a new and interesting direction.

I do like that this film is a lot less intense than Trainspotting.  You get the impression that while heroin is a rough, destructive drug, ecstasy – while still very dangerous – is more tame and more about heightened emotions and sensations.  It allows for this film to almost function as a traditional romance, with the drug inspiring love and love-like feelings, as well as clichéd moments of spontaneous poetry which would be terrible in a Nicholas Sparks movie, but works here because director Rob Heydon is so clearly establishing how this drug affects its users.

No special features.  Available now on DVD from Cinedigm.

This blind pursuit of the ominous case does create some interesting themes in the film.  Hubris and greed, along with some fairly obvious parallels to the legend of Pandora’s box all create a very effective tone for the film.  Plus, it’s a dark comedy, which automatically wins it points with me.  Unfortunately there are many more problems with the film than good qualities.  Yes, it’s a dark comedy, but much of the humor isn’t coming from a character-driven place.  Instead, it relies on humorous banter, which is entertaining but never pushes the film to having something relevant to say.  Also, there’s a fairly large number of useless characters in this.  Even Eric Roberts’ character is barely necessary to the plot, and the Master isn’t menacing enough to be an effective villain.  The only characters that make the film worth anyone’s time are Barabba (Brian Keith Gamble) and Caesar (Chris Facey); two business partners (possibly brothers), who stumble upon the case and have to put up with a lot of hassle over the course of the film because of it.  These characters are definitely the best developed in the movie, and their scenes have a great energy that makes them fun to watch, rather than the chore of watching all of the other scenes.

I think my biggest problem with the film is that it largely feels like a rip-off of Pulp Fiction.  Tonally, the films are very similar, with the exception of Pulp Fiction’s humor feeling much more organic to the characters.  Imagine if Pulp Fiction was only about Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta retrieving the mysterious glowing briefcase and returning it to Ving Rhames, and none of the other storylines existed.  Also, take out the stuff with Harvey Keitel.  Then, imagine what might be in the Pulp Fiction briefcase and try to come up with something far less interesting.  That’s basically what this film is.

I can’t comment on any special features that may appear on the DVD because I only received a burned copy of the film.  Not only that, the picture quality on my copy was really awful; worse than standard DVD definition.  It was very pixilated and distracting, and probably made it harder for me to enjoy what was going on in the film.  Available now on DVD from Broken Glass Pictures.

Unfortunately there’s not a lot to like about this film.  Tonally, it’s pretty cool – reminiscent of a Film Noir.  The acting is strong even if the characterization is not.  And even though the film gets slow at times, it is paced well overall; telling its story in a way that doesn’t feel like it’s being dragged out too much.

Unfortunately, each of these good things about the film comes with a problem.  Yes, the tone is interesting, but the entire film stinks of a twist ending coming.  I had a twist in mind the whole time and the weird thing is that not only did that twist not happen, the film didn’t have much of an ending at all.  So, it’s not that I was proven wrong by having a different twist happen, but rather was left confused by the rather abrupt ending the film actually has.  So, I guess what’s going on with Charlie’s character is left up for debate, but that is really lazy writing to me.  I think I’d prefer the awful twist ending I was dreading in my head to the non-ending we end up with here.

None of the characters are really well executed.  Charlie is meek and unimposing, but with moments of rage that make him dangerous.  The fact that he spends the entire movie reacting to other characters’ wants rather than having any of his own makes him pretty uninteresting though.  Florence has virtually no character-defining action other than her constant want to sleep with Charlie, and her love of a particular red car.  There are other bizarre inconsistencies in her character that feel like they were thrown in to make the film longer.  One scene in a church stands out as particularly weird because Florence demonstrates this sudden random religious side that is not at all apparent in the rest of the film.

The best character is the Buddha, and Willem Dafoe does an excellent job of bringing the character to life.  The huge problem is that he only has a few minutes of screen time over the course of the movie.  Most of the film is focused on the Charlie/Florence relationship, and the Buddha is all but ignored.  It’s a real shame and I’m not sure why they did the movie this way, but wonder if it doesn’t have something to do with the fact that Dorff and Monaghan were producers on the film, and thus couldn’t have any of their precious screen time edited out.  That’s just a guess though.

No special features.  Can’t recommend the Blu-ray over the regular DVD on this one because the visuals simply aren’t up to that caliber.  Available now from RLJ Entertainment.